


felled by you, held by you

by twnkwlf



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bodyguard, F/M, Light Dom/sub, Reporter Karen Page
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 06:36:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18026633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twnkwlf/pseuds/twnkwlf
Summary: The fist time Karen laid her eyes on Frank Castle, she wondered if he was coming out of her pay check.a kastle bodyguard au





	felled by you, held by you

**Author's Note:**

> i still can't believe this au genre hasn't been tapped by kastle fans!?
> 
> the title comes from NFWMB by hozier 
> 
> warnings: light dom karen/ sub frank vibes going on here, but everything is consensual
> 
> if ya want you can follow my soon to be defunct punisher blog on tumblr @castleraven

The fist time Karen laid her eyes on Frank Castle, she wondered if he was coming out of her pay check.

Ellison had promised that the Bulletin would spare no expense on her security this weekend, that there was too much at stake. She didn’t know if he meant her life or the story, but either way, the man in front of her was no mall cop security guard hired from the yellow pages. She took all of him in, a black suit looking stark against the brightness of the hotel lobby, a jarhead haircut that she knew was military and not a personal style. He couldn’t have been cheap.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

He had a scar shaped like a fish hook on the hand that reached out for hers.

“Ma’am.” He nodded once, avoiding her eyes, and shook her hand ever so slightly before drawing himself back into a reserved stance, hands together at his waist, eyes cresting over the top of Karen’s head to observe the people around them.

“Well, um. We’re up on the eighth—”

“Shouldn’t say that too loud, ma’am. Keep that to yourself.”

All of this felt a little too serious. A little ridiculous, really.

Maybe it was because she had yet to feel a sense of danger in her investigation. Sure, she knew that it was dangerous— people had died trying to uncover what she was uncovering, but it was abstract, removed.

What she felt most was an _urgency_. She had two days to conduct interviews with her source, who was staying at the hotel across the street under a false name, hanging onto extremely expensive and incriminating documents belonging to Union Allied Construction. She had two days to ask all the right questions, to find the pulsing heart of the story and make it bleed. Her only fear was that it would somehow slip through her fingers and turn to dust before she could get it on ink and paper.

She and the security guard took an elevator ride to the eighth floor. It was silent and tense as gravity dragged them upwards. Karen’s eyes bore into the back of Frank’s head the whole time. He stood in front of her with purpose, his body blocking hers, which she supposed was his job as her bodyguard. It was funny how literal things could be.

It was still tense as they entered her room. He wordlessly stepped ahead of her, moving with a hand placed carefully on his hip where she could see the black shape of a gun handle. He went straight to the bathroom to investigate the shower curtain.

 “So, I’m not sure how much you know about the situation or if—” she called out, taking the opportunity to run her hands through her hair and kick off her uncomfortable heels. “If you know what we’re doing here, but it’s…high stakes.”

“I’ve been briefed on everything, ma’am.” He was checking the closets now.

“Okay. Great. So I guess…”

He seemed to be satisfied with the scan of the room, coming into the bedroom area, hands no longer touching the piece on his hip.

“I have the connecting room. Through there.” He pointed to the heavy white door near the bed. “You should keep it unlocked at all times.”

“Right. Of course.”

“When you’re ready to move out in the mornings, tap on the door like this.” He rapped his knuckles against the wall in a specific rhythm that she copied silently on her own thigh, a neighborly kind of knock

Then he reached into the inside of his jacket pocket, retrieving something small.

“And you’ll have this on you always. You press it if you’re in danger.”

It was a small device that looked like a pager, but with a single black button in the middle. It made him seem a little like an automated machine. Just one click of a button and he was summoned to her, like it was pre-programmed. When Frank slipped it into her hand, he held it for a second longer than necessary. For the first time, his brown eyes met hers, shiny and dark.

“You press that if you hear something. If you see something. If you even get the goddamn goosebumps, alright? Middle of the night, middle of the day. I will come for you.”

Karen swallowed the words in her throat as he let go of her hand, eyes still lingering on hers for some kind of agreement. A sudden image crossed her mind—this man, this practical stranger, jumping in front of her to take a bullet. She had no doubt that he was the kind of person who might do it.

“I’ll, uh, let you get settled in.” His eyes scanned the room one more time before settling on her again. So serious. He looked at her like she was the most important woman in the world.

“Thank you.” It felt like an unfair trade.

After he left through the white door, she stood in the pristine hotel room holding the panic button like a talisman to her chest. Something had shaken her bones. That urgency that had been keeping her up night these past few weeks— she could feel it changing in the pit of her stomach into something else.

She’d never felt more protected in her entire life. That was real.

So maybe the danger was real, too.  
  


/  
  


“Once I hand you the files, that’s it.”  

The room service coffee was good at Daniel’s hotel— rich and Italian, probably made from some state-of-the-art industrial kitchen appliance. Despite this, Karen could barely choke down a few sips. She abandoned her drink to the coffee table. She wished it was late enough in the day to justify a cocktail.

Across from her, the source’s hands shook, clattering the china as he tried to take an even drink of his own cappuccino. For two people about to bring down a multi-million-dollar company and a ring of organized crime, they had some shoddy nerves. She glanced quickly to the door, which Frank stood in front of, observing the room silently. His eyes met hers for half a second before they both looked away.

Leaning forward, she turned off the tape recorder, ending the interview. It had been a long three hours of Q & A, of hammering out the details, of getting context for the evidence that was on those files, which he had yet to hand over.

Daniel helped turn accounting figures and financial jargon into a real picture, a story not only about off shore accounts and laundering, but the human pawns and casualties. White collar crime was nothing new to the city of New York, but Union Allied was different. The city had needed the promise of rebuilding, of change, after so much destruction. Union Allied had played them all for fools—building the bricks of the towers back up but planting thick roots of corruption underneath. Karen could feel the tension of the story boiling under her skin.

“What will you do? I mean after this,” she asked Daniel.

“That’s for me to know, Miss Page.” He gave her a half-smile, but his eyes were sad, rimmed with redness. Behind him was an unmade bed and an incredible amount of luggage, as if he had his entire life packed away. Maybe he would never go home again. “What about you?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you publish your story. When we’re all waiting around for the long arm of the law to do its thing, or whatever. What will you do?

Karen balked a little but tried not to show it. “You don’t need to worry about me, Dan.”

“You know what happened to the first reporter who tried to do this with me? The guy from _the Times_?”

“I read about it. There was a burglary in his loft. He was shot.”

“You know they weren’t looking for iPads and TV’s, don’t you?”

Karen took a steadying breath. Of course she knew how that reporter had died—it was the reason why there was an ex-marine standing in the room as they spoke. It was the reason this story was life-or-death. Again, she looked to Frank, whose jaw was tighter than before, if possible.

“I’m not going to let this story die, Daniel. You’ve lost too much for me to let that happen. We all know that Union Allied’s power runs deep. But I promise you—they are not as powerful as I am _pissed off._ ”

Daniel smiled at her. He stood then, moved over to his bed, lifting the pillow to grab a small envelope that was hidden there. She noticed Frank subtly slip his hand to his hip and track him across the room, but Daniel had more reason to not trust them than the other way around.

He looked into Karen’s eyes as he placed the thumb drive on the coffee table next to her abandoned latte. He was honest, desperate, and maybe a little joyful.

The drive sat there like a loaded gun.

“We could have used a girl like you in legal.” Daniel smiled. “You would have made the department managers sweat.”  
  


/  
  


By the time she had finished uploading the contents of the thumb drive to the Bulletin servers, it was well into the morning, and her hotel room went pitch black as she closed the lid of her laptop. The clock beside the bed read 1:35 in the morning.  

She stood and stretched, the pressure of the day bleeding out through her shoulders. She was nearly through, nearly at the end of the tunnel. She needed to put the finishing touches on the article, and then Ellison would handle the rest. And this money laundering scheme would become a matter of public record.

She decided it was time for that cocktail.

The bar mini fridge had nothing but spiced rum, for some reason, the mere thought of which made her gag. She thought about calling down for service, but that would probably result in her bodyguard storming through the door to investigate the bellboy. She stared at the white door that separated her and Frank—why not cut out the middle man?

She rapped on the door in the familiar pattern and his answer was immediate. He had taken off the suit and was only wearing a white undershirt, a pair of dark sweats—an ensemble that suited him more than any jacket and tie could. He looked at her with curiosity and concern, peering around her shoulder to check the room behind her.

“I’m sorry, you weren’t sleeping, were you?”

“No, ma’am.”

Behind him, she saw the blue light of the television on mute, bouncing off the walls. She wondered if he ever slept.

“I just, um…” she gestured to her own mini fridge. “All they have is Captain Morgan in here. I need a drink that doesn’t remind me of freshmen year.”

Frank surprised her by smirking at that. It was a marvel to see him smile, the way it brought a light to his face that felt almost illicit. He stepped to the side to let her in the room.

Inside was immaculate, as if he hadn’t been sleeping here at all. Where Karen’s room had clothes and papers scattered around the surfaces, Frank had nothing but a single black suitcase.

She helped herself to the minifridge, happy to see two tiny bottles of overpriced Jack Daniels.

“Would you like a drink, Frank?”

“I’m fine with coffee, ma’am.”

“Call me Karen,” she asked, turning around to face him again. “Please.”

“Okay, Karen.” Her name in his mouth made her pause. She wanted him to say it again. Quickly, she shut the thought down and tossed him one of the bottles of Jack, which he caught as though he was expecting it.

“Make it Irish?” she insisted.

Frank wordlessly moved to his coffee cup, pouring the liquor in. He seemed to do it like he was taking orders, but he took a large sip when Karen sat down at the small dining table. She clinked her bottle with his cup and drank the fiery shot down.

“You’re celebrating or something?” He took another slow slug of the coffee.

“Yep. This story was…Christ, eight months in the making. Feels like it’s been years.”

“Here’s to it,” Frank said, raising his cup. She smiled and clinked it again.

After a few moments, Frank finally lowered himself into the chair across from her. He scratched his cheek, which was dark with a five o’clock shadow, and asked her, “you got a plan for tomorrow?”

Karen raised her eyebrows, confused.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated. “When you check out of this hotel. When our contract is up.”

“Well…the story will hit the printers first thing…and then I go home. You go home. Where is home for you, anyway?”

“Midtown, ma’am.” He raised his hand slightly in apology before she could correct him for the _ma’am_. “Look I get why your boss put me on you for this weekend, making sure you got those files without a hitch. But who you got looking out for you now?”  

“I’ll be fine,” she said, feeling déjà vu from this morning.

“These, uh, Union Allied guys— they’re a pretty powerful fuckin’ enemy, huh? That shit they did to _the Times_ reporter, what your guy said earlier? That’s got dirty NYPD written all over it.”

Karen remained silent. She took another swig of her whiskey, but it wasn’t quite doing the trick. She thought for a few moments, staring at the blue light reflecting on the gold in the wallpaper.

“This is my job,” she said, finally. “I have to believe that what I do makes a difference, even when the cops are crooked, and the judges are bought. People on the street know injustice when they see it. I make sure they see it.”

“Taking the law into your own hands, huh?”

She smiled, looking down. Finally, the whiskey was warming her belly, making her shoulders sag. She wondered how unethical it might be to ask Frank for a shoulder rub.

Frank took another swig of his drink and then ran his hands over his face and leaned back. In one quick movement, he pulled a gun from his waistband. Karen immediately tensed up again, unsure for a split second what was happening until he pulled the piece back and unloaded the clip, setting the bullets on the table with a heavy thump. He held the gun aloft.

“You have one of these in your apartment?”

“No, Jesus, I—”

“Maybe you oughta look into getting one. I’m not kidding you, Karen.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to load it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’d end up shooting myself in the foot.”

“Here,” he said softly. Then he guided her hand to his, placing the gun in her palm with the same intent and intensity as he had placed that panic button. Slowly and carefully, he guided her through loading and unloading, through switching the safety. His hands were rough against hers as he guided her fingers down to the trigger and told her to pull.

“You find yourself on the right side of a gun, you pull the trigger. You do it again and again and you don’t hesitate, not even for a second.”

“Do you do that a lot? Shoot without hesitation?”

He met here eyes, elbows bent on his knees, swaying slightly. “It’s better to kill than to die.”

She put the gun back in his hand and held it there, fingers dancing on the heel of his palm. “I think you’re probably right about that.”  
  


/  
  


A week later, she still had the panic button in her purse.

Frank had never asked for it back and she had never offered. The day after their night cap, they had shaken hands and parted ways in the hotel lobby, like a bookend. Frank had looked her in the eyes instead of searching the room, and he called her by her name when they said goodbye.

She stowed the Frank button away like a souvenir— of what, she wasn’t sure.

But at night, she would place it on her bedside table next to her alarm clock and reading glasses, like it belonged there, and she would stare at its outline in feint streetlight through her bedroom curtains. The thought of pressing it would lull her to sleep.

She had dreams that felt like calloused hands on her skin and smelled like Jack Daniels and coffee. She had dreams that sounded like a gunshot, that drew hot red blood from the pit of her stomach. She dreamed of a heavy white door and a knock with no answer.

She woke hard from these dreams with a heart pounding erratically in her chest. Sometimes she would reach down and grip the kitchen knife that she’d started hiding between the box spring, imagining that she could cut whatever fear she felt in half like an enemy. Sometimes she woke from these dreams and reached under the sheets instead, letting the bold rhythm of her heart set the pace until she came hard, imagining that the crushing fear was really just the weight of him.  
  


/  
  


“You look like shit, Page.”

Ellison wasn’t the most tactful of bosses, but he had a point. Karen had stopped trying to cover her dark circles with concealer and had leaned into the nervous buzz of too-much caffeine.

“I haven’t been sleeping the greatest.”

He laid a paper down on her desk in front of her, that day’s headline— “ _D.A LAYS CHARGES ON FISK IN UNION ALLIED CASE.”_

“Have you though about maybe exhaling?” he asked, crossing his arms.

Karen laughed at that. It felt more like she hadn’t taken a breath in weeks. The air felt as thin as the atmosphere on top of a mountain, and Karen didn’t know how to climb down.

“I’m good, boss.” She ran her fingers over the ink on the paper, smudging the picture of Wilson Fisk’s face a little. “It’s just strange, is all.”

“What’s strange?”

Karen stood from her desk and tried to roll some of the tension out of her shoulders. She walked around to the window where her office had a mediocre view of the neighborhood—overrun now with billboards and some condo developments. There were still some Union Allied Construction signs smattering the scene beneath her like ghosts.

“I keep waiting for…something to happen. I don’t really know what.”

“Well,” Ellison said as he moved to stand next to her. “Wilson Fisk is going to jail, Union Allied is being dissolved, and you just became of one the most respected investigative journalists in New York City. I think that _something_ you’re waiting for is a national TV interview. CNN call you yet?”

/

At first, it was another dream. She felt the heat of someone’s skin against her mouth, against her throat. It could have been loving, like some of the dreams where he held her. She didn’t even open her eyes—she just tried to inhale, only to find the task impossible, as if she really was at the peak of a mountain with no oxygen and no way to descend.

When the cold metal of a gun barrel touched her forehead, she knew it was real.

She slid a silent hand to the knife in her mattress as she felt something in the gun click against her skull, sending a wave of panic and action through her, waking every nerve in her body.

A small and swift part of her felt relief instead of fear, like this was always meant to happen, like the nightmares had been preparing her for this moment.

In one fell swoop, she moved against the weight of the gun and threw her body forward in a scream, her fist clenched hard around the handle of the knife. It made impact, sinking deep into something. The sensation of it was so impossibly banal, like slicing into raw meat. Karen only looked when she felt the wetness of blood on her hands.

In the darkness of her bedroom, she could see that the man wore glasses and a suit, and he was standing now, stumbling away from the bed, his eyes fixed on the knife buried in his abdomen. It was dead quiet in the apartment, which made the noises escaping his mouth so much louder than they really were. She could hear the blood falling like a leaky faucet on the ground.

Karen drew a ragged breath. So did he.

She watched him try to raise the gun in his hand but fail. It landed with a heavy thud on floor, where blood was starting to pool.  Then she watched him crumple like a puppet whose strings had been cut. For a few moments, she watched the blood grow like a living thing, a blackness expanding on the floor, sucking all the light from the room. She watched him die in the dark.

With shaking fingers, Karen reached for the panic button on her table. She pressed it and whispered Frank’s name.

_Better to kill than to die._  
  


/  
  


It was way past dawn by the time she was alone again. The evidence and circumstance painted an irrefutable picture of self-defence, especially when they identified the man as Fisk’s most trusted personal assistant.

The air was charged with pity as the cops took her statements in the kitchen, sitting at her own table. Eventually, they told her she wasn’t likely to be charged, but would have to go to the station the following day to handle the rest of it. It was funny how bureaucratic death could be. Something that felt so carnal and uncivilized could so easily be abstracted through signatures and stamps on paper.

They asked her if she had somewhere to go, someone to call.

She told them yes, thinking of Frank.

When they left, they left the mess. The blood was starting to coagulate on the floor and some of it was still caked into her fingers, on her sheets. It smelled heavy and irony, like raw metal. The garish light of the day painted the room in a strange, dissonant brightness. She was exhausted, and wanted to sleep, but couldn’t return to her bed.

That’s when he knocked on the window.

She thought it was her imagination until he knocked again, staring at her through the pane of glass with his jaw tight and eyes focused.

He took her by the elbows when she let him in, squeezing softly. He seemed to scan her whole body for injury until she held a hand up to his face.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“You’re fine,” he repeated. “You’re good.”

She nodded, noticing him checking out the blood on the floor, the blood on her shirt, the blood on her hands.

“I pressed that button, Frank.”

“It was too far out of range.”

She felt tears sting at her eyes fast and hard, and then it was as if the wind was knocked out of her. Karen leaned forward and Frank caught her, his forehead meeting hers. She sobbed as quietly as she could and he pressed back against her, hands coming up to hold her head.

“You’re good,” he kept saying. “You’re good, Karen.”

 _I wanted you to come for me,_ she thought. She was half crying with rage, mostly for the gun that had touched her skin, but partly for Frank, for the heavy absence of him. Irrational as it was, she was angry, deep in the pit of her stomach. She dug her fingers into the meat of his arms, some unknowable feeling mixing with that anger.

After a while, he guided her into the bathroom and rolled up his sleeves. She shivered and avoided her reflection in the mirror, watching him instead as he started up the hot water of her shower. Steam filled the room quickly, making him look translucent.

“I’ll get rid of those,” he said, pointing to her bloodied clothes. “Just leave ‘em in the sink.”

Almost on autopilot, she lifted her shirt over her head. He only looked for a second before turning his back to her, moving out of the bathroom with a nod. She wasn’t thinking, but she wasn’t embarrassed. He was nearly a stranger to her, but she would let him wash her back if she had the guts to ask.

Karen stayed under the spray for a long time. She scrubbed her body down twice until every patch of skin was raw and resistant. She let the water turn icy against the heat of her neck and stood there, teeth chattering, until she couldn’t stand it.

With her towel wrapped around her, she emerged from the steam, half expecting Frank to have disappeared again. Instead, she found him ringing a towel out in the kitchen sink. The water was tinged pink.

“Did you clean the…?”

“It’s all taken care of.”

She stood against the doorframe, starting at him as he washed his hands and dried them on her tea towels, like he knew the place, like he belonged there.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “You’re good at taking care.”

Frank turned to face her, his mouth a hard line. “Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

He bit his bottom lip, shaking his head, avoiding her eyes. “I shoulda been there. I shoulda stopped this.”

“I stopped paying you to protect me, Frank.”

“That’s not the point.”

She agreed, even though there was no real explanation for it. He was a service and she was a customer, so why did it ache so much when he looked at her? Why did she want him on his knees in front of her?

Slowly, she pulled the knot loose from her towel and let it fall. Frank didn’t turn his back this time. He watched her for a long minute. Karen turned her back first, moving into the bedroom. He followed her closely behind, like she knew he would.  

The room smelled of bleach and clean laundry. He had made her goddamn bed, sheets tucked uniformly like a soldier’s bunk. She pushed her hand to the centre of Frank’s chest, guiding him down to sit upon it, and she climbed into his lap, knees on either side of his thighs. Frank’s breath was fast, but controlled and hot, huffing through his nose. He looked down once, down to where her thighs were spread, eyes going dark at the sight.

Karen placed her hands on his face, pulling him back in to look at her. She took a steadying breath and kissed him, hot, mouth open. She grinded herself against the denim on his thigh and hissed at the roughness—his skin, his clothes, his edges. She pulled back.

“Will you fuck me?”

“Yeah,” he said on breath.

“Because I’m asking?”

He took longer to respond, but when he did, he reached down and pressed three hot fingers against her clit. “Whatever you need. Whatever you want.”

She gasped and moved her hips against the pressure. Frank used his other hand to unzip himself and push down his jeans. Karen didn’t want to wait or let it build. She quickly pushed his fingers further down, guiding him to press them inside her. It was just a means to an end, but his calloused fingers sild into her she was a trigger.

She didn’t even look at his cock before she sank onto it. She just squeezed her arms around him, rocking slowly at first as they both adjusted. She heard Frank swear softly, _“fucking, Christ,”_ and she picked up the pace.

He started to rock into her, meeting her halfway, his thumb rubbing her in tight, hard circles. Every muscle tightened as the liquid-hot feeling crept up on her. She sobbed into his shoulder.

“There you go,” he grunted into her hair.  

It was fast. She came with him still pushing up inside her and then he slowed, letting here spasm and shake around him.

She could feel him shaking from the need to fuck into her more, but she pushed down on his shoulders and stopped him, oversensitive. He groaned quietly because it was torturous, because she was in control, because if she asked him to get up and leave right now, he would. His mouth hung open a little as she climbed slowly off him, down to her knees where she could see all of him. His dick was angry red, shiny with her come.

Frank had promised something to her the day they met, that he would come for her day or night. More than a promise, it was something he gave to her. She held it in her hand like the panic button. She only had to say the words and he was summoned, like it was automatic.

“Come for me,” she whispered, placing a soft kiss on his bare knee.


End file.
